Friday, November 16, 2007

When the Head and the Heart Part Company...

On Wednesday night, someone on Deadspin Up! All Night asked me this very simple question:

"So, I hate to ask, but what's your thoughts going into this weeks big game? Do they win one for Lloyd?"

I pondered it, and I pondered it further. After the jump, my reply.

I don't know. I just don't know.

My heart tells me yes, that somehow, playing exactly one year to the day of Bo's death, Hart/Henne/Long's last home game, the last game in Michigan Stadium in its current configuration, and potentially Coach Carr's last game, that everything is setting up for the boys to rally together and win one, putting a gleaming capstone on what is a too readily dismissed period in Michigan football history.

"But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love."

If hope dies last...if faith did not leave me after The Unpleasantness and The Slaughter in September, when it would have been easiest to be tested, but instead I still chose to believe. If Michigan football is my one true unquestioned love of my entire adult life, I have to believe they will find a way, even if everything logical and rational tells me not to get my hopes up, I must believe. Because hope does die last.

Or as someone much better at this than I am said: Go. Fight. Win. Please.

But, as someone else said, sometimes you only have two words left, and they are the only two you need. Go Blue!

Mission Statement

"But do let me reiterate the spirit of Michigan.It is based upon a deathless loyalty to Michigan and all her ways; an enthusiasm that makes it second nature for Michigan men to spread the gospel of their university to the world's distant outposts; a conviction that nowhere is there a better university, in any way, than this Michigan of ours."

--Fielding H. Yost upon his retirement as Michigan's athletic director in 1940.